A Day at the Northern General, Sheffield
Why did we go?
We (Rachel Gair, TP-CKD Person Centred Care Facilitator and Catherine Stannard, TP-CKD Programme Support Officer) were invited to the Northern General Hospital, Sheffield (NGS) to run a workshop as part of the TP-CKD programme. On discussion with the unit leads prior to our visit, they had asked us to engage the teams by sharing results of ‘Your Health Survey’ and facilitate them to gain an understanding of how they can be involved in embedding person centred care at the heart of practice.
NGS have been a vital participator in the TP-CKD programme, have collected and returned over 300 Your Health Surveys from within their haemodialysis (HD) and low clearance population. NGS also lead the SHAREHD programme which is using Your Health Survey as one of the outcome measures whilst encouraging HD patients to participate in self-care through HD related tasks.
What we did
In anticipation of the workshop, senior sister Cheryl Matthews had organised the shifts and discussed with the staff their expected attendance. In order to meet with as many staff as possible we ran two 20-30 minutes sessions for 9 staff members in total – 3 dialysis specialist nurses, 2 nurses, 5 dialysis assistants and Cheryl Matthews. We provided an overview of Person Centred Care and how measuring patient activation and patient reported outcome measures can support this. We discussed with the different staff groups the concept of individualised care and how by measuring activation, tailored interventions can be introduced to support an improvement in knowledge, skills and confidence.
We also discussed the importance of communication and delivering information to patients that have different levels of activation – those who are level 1 might be overwhelmed with little understanding of their role as partners. We linked this to the example of a young man who was about to go home on HD, his journey, and how staff had supported him to self-care using an approach that was appropriate for him.
What does good look like?
Drawing on the experience of our visit to Heeley Dialysis Unit, what does good look like? It has strong and credible nursing leadership fostering levels of engagement, commitment and motivation of the team. Our visit was planned to make sure that the staff who had been involved in the implementation of Your Health Surveys were updated, and gained an understanding of how important their role is day to day.
The team were interested and interactive – one of the main themes that we kept returning to was the importance of communication and how sometimes the person behind the patient becomes lost in ‘tasks and technology’. Cheryl cited how she had challenged her team to find out one new piece of personal information from each one of their patients and report back during handover. This enabled them to start building a simple but effective person centred approach to care using a key skill – communication. We are looking forward to returning to the Heeley Dialysis team in September 2017 to run a further educational session on communication skills. We hope this session will facilitate the staff to introduce small cycles of change towards a person-centred care approach, and inform their work in the future.